Elite: Dangerous Kickstarter Launched

I actually think I’d enjoy it as a sandbox. No doubt I’d get tired of this eventually, but I like what they’ve got - it does look like a strong infrastructure that they could maybe hang a campaign on at some point.

As Ultrazen said, it’s a fantastic take off and landing simulator.

I love taking off and landing! Well, I love taking off. My landings usually don’t go so good.

Elite’s in a weird place. They have this online component, and have tied everything into that idea, what with the background simulation and such. And yet even though it’s an online game, and it’s what… 3 years since it released? You still can’t even do a mission with a friend! I fire this up with my buddy and we’re both kind of looking at each other just thinking “now what?”. There’s literally nothing to do together, aside from maybe blowing up some pirates at a RES.

It’s the weirdest damn game. The attention to detail of the audio system, of the flight systems, of the whole stellar forge thing is just mindblowing. Flying a ship is so superb that the banal tasks like launching and landing a ship are a joy. It’s like they did all the hard stuff, and then… completely neglected an actual game or game design.

To me, the resource extraction sites are a microcosm of the game. The setup is good: you have a resource-rich asteroid field that NPCs are mining. And there are NPCs attacking those miners. So that right there should set up something awesome: you can go mine for your wealth, be a pirate and steal that wealth, or maybe even play cop and go hunt down the baddies.

Yet everything is completely out of whack. The resources being mined are utter garbage and not even worth your time. Who wants to spend all that time and effort to get a ton of a mineral worth 800 credits? Worse, who wants to become a criminal to steal, at best, a few thousand credits worth of cargo from a miner? Instead, you can shoot down a pirate and get 80,000 credits in a quick bounty payment.

None of it makes any sense, just like the rest of the game. Silly bastards.

This is true all of it. But I am still playing. In fact I am playing a second account as well on the PS4 now. Just chilling and exploring in my Adder. I had forgotten how pretty the bubble is. There is no grind for me, I just started exploring and it took me maybe a couple of hours to get 3Mcr from a new start and it was fun. I would have done it by passenger missions as well if I had preferred. Making money really is not a problem for these two activities at least.

I love this game, I think its one of if not the best games ever made… BUT…

But its development strategy is just crazy. So all the items they listed at the expo are fine and free. although stacked to the back half of the year I note and so easily slippable. But then this week they also said there will be paid content next year , presumably bigger? They always do this, just hint at stuff then months, years go by. Then they do things that are simply irrelevant to most of the player base, these Thargoids or “lore” missions. All of them are out of reach for almost all players no matter how hardcore even if we cared (I dont but even if I did it would be out of reach).

So I am left with “hope” that next year will be different after the past two years of disappointment. It sucks because there is SO MUCH low hanging fruit that could immediately improve the game, starting with putting interesting stuff on planets to discover, hell just charge me $30 for it ffs. But they dont they keep this strange meandering dev plan. Sigh.

Yep, that’s the most frustrating part for me. They nailed the really hard stuff, and then have left so much easy stuff for years without addressing it. It is SO frustrating.

Awesome engineers, complete shite game designers. And I mean “even shittier than a first-year at FullSail” bad. Like mentioned above, so much low-hanging fruit just waiting to be plucked… and we get non-working MP, non-working multicrew, a vague and dissatisfying powers system, an abandoned arena mode, and “lore” that applies to maybe 1% of the players – the hardest-core tryhards with multiple Anacondas. Everything else is pure RNG grind with constantly-moving, constantly out-of-whack trading/exploring/mining/shootguy imbalances.

I have lots of nerd rage over Elite. It’s like… she’s about to, you know, finish you off, but then stops all of sudden to punch you in the face. Then she starts up again. A really perverted Lucy-Charlie Brown thing. I’m sorry.

It may be perverted, but I can’t say it’s inaccurate. :)

Completely accurate. I feel like I reached a point where I finally climbed over a wall I’d been struggling to climb for months and there was nothing on the other side, so I felt this great weight of disappointment as I stare into this abyss. It’s a damned shame.

VR resurrected my interest in this game in a big way. But I definitely agree the game needs more interesting content. Simply adding animated characters who talk to you at a space bar (like in Rebel Galaxy) would go a long way to making the game a more vibrant, colorful place to be in.

I’ve been meaning to pick this up on sale ever since I brought a rift, but I’ve idly watched several markdowns pass by since. I bounced pretty hard off the earlier X games, and I get the feeling that the cockpit n’ spreadsheets genre just isn’t for me.

Some kind of fake human interaction (not real ones, mind you) would do it for me.

You could use the takeoff and landing part of this game, and just add a progression to how difficult the landings and takeoffs you have to make are due to…SPACE STUFF…like gravitational fields and whatnot…and you’d pretty much have a great game, even if that’s all it did.

This is one of those games that really frustrated me, the sense of flying when you are engaged with objects that are close to you is so good, and it’s a miniscule part of the game. The fact that you spend so much time in “space”, without objects close to you is such a fundamental failure to understand what’s good about the game.

It’s really not very similar to X (which I bounced off as well, mostly because the cockpit was superfluous to the spreadsheet). It’s really all about the in-the-cockpit experience, to the detriment of some other areas of the game. I think it’s got the best space sim-ish flight model out there right now (I might even argue it’s in the all-time top 3), so if that’s appealing to you it’s worth a try. There’s plenty of fun to be had in just asteroid belt pew-pew. It’s gorgeous, has amazing sound, and is challenging.

It is a lonely game, that’s for sure. That lone pilot out in the void experience is a big part of what appeals to me, but will leave others cold. I’m happy bumbling about gawking at the scenery and soaking up the cockpit experience in VR. I recognize I’m an outlier and hope they get on a development path that appeals to the other voices in this thread. I mean, if you’re making a space sim and you’ve lost @BrianRubin, you obviously need to figure your shit out.

Word. To be clear i am with you. I LOVE this game, so so much. I still play it daily. But yeah it could be so much more.

It’s a great game and I love it. But you CAN burn out on it easily. Just like any other MMO, you can get stuck in some intense grinding. The trick is to vary the missions you take and avoid those grinds as much as possible. I’ve done combat, trading, passengers, some engineering and mining, planetary landings… there’s a lot to do.

Excellent point! I enjoy this stuff, too, but I can see how it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Same with the Truck Simulator games, and flight sims.

Aaaagh. It’s not an MMO, you can barely even play with friends! But like you say, you have a ton of the drawbacks of garbage of MMOs… just with basically none of the upside.

Yeah, I couldn’t come up with another term and technically it IS a massive online game with thousands of players… you just never encounter any of them. :)

Permadeath would make the 80,000 credits seem a little more risky.

The funny thing is, being the bounty hunter is the safe route to take. Because your hold is empty, any NPC pirate will leave you alone. You get to dictate any engagement you make, and you’re also outfitted with a combat ship so when the lasers do start to fly, you’re equipped to handle it. The poor miners, on the other hand…

So not only are we left with a weird situation where the only commodity of real value in a RES are the pirates hunting after garbage/worthless resources, but the path with the least risk is going after the highest reward. Such a perfect microcosm of how bonkers the whole game is. :)